MIT’s “grand dame of tech transfer,” Lita Nelsen, has been made a Member of the Order of the British Empire, according to the office of the British Consulate-General in Boston. Nelsen, a 2006 Mass High Tech All-Star, was honored for her work shaping the tech transfer landscape under the Cambridge-MIT Institute, which is entirely less redundant than it sounds.  

Ms. Nelsen has done much to influence the recent culture shift towards commercialisation by UK universities. In 2002, with David Secher then Director of Research Services at Cambridge University, Ms. Nelsen organised Praxis, a not-for profit organisation running a training programme on knowledge transfer for commercialisation staff in UK academic institutions.

Nelsen joins all four Beatles, golfer Nick Faldo and Jackie Chan as a member of the order. The 2009 class also includes former Boston and current Los Angeles police commissioner Bill Bratton. 

In February, Nelson told Mass High Tech she was optimistic about the state of tech transfer after an Association of Tech Transfer Managers survey pointed to an uptick in startups coming out of New England colleges.